You've typed your own business name into Google and nothing came up. Or worse — a competitor two miles away came up and you didn't. Before you panic, or pay anyone to fix it, work out which of six things is actually happening. One of them isn't a problem at all, and one of them almost nobody tells you about.
This is one of the most common questions we get from tradespeople, and it's usually asked with a fair amount of stress attached. If customers can't find you on Maps, you're invisible at the exact moment someone needs a plumber, an electrician, or a roofer right now.
The good news: most causes are fixable, and several are fixable by you, today, for nothing. The less good news: one cause can't be fixed by anyone, and knowing that saves you from chasing a problem that doesn't exist.
Before assuming something's broken, rule out the most common false alarm. A lot of tradespeople search their own business name on their own phone, while logged into their own Google account, sitting at their kitchen table — and then draw conclusions from what they see.
That's not a reliable test, for two reasons.
The first is personalisation. Google knows it's you. Your own results are shaped by your account, your search history, and the fact you've clicked your own listing before. What you see is not what a stranger sees.
The second is the bigger one, and it catches almost everybody: Google Maps ranks on proximity to the person searching, not proximity to you. If you live eight miles outside the town you actually work in, searching from home will show you the businesses near your house — not the ones near your customers. Your listing can be performing perfectly well in your service area while appearing nowhere in a search you ran from your sofa.
To test it more honestly: open a private or incognito window, and search for your trade plus the town you actually want work in — "emergency plumber Loughton" rather than just your business name. Then separately, search your exact business name in that same private window. Those two searches answer different questions. The first tells you whether you're competing. The second tells you whether you exist in Google's records at all.
If you've tested properly and you're genuinely absent, it'll almost always be one of these.
Creating a Google Business Profile and verifying it are two different steps. Plenty of tradespeople create one, get distracted by an actual job, and never complete verification — usually a postcard, phone call, or video. An unverified profile has limited visibility in local results. This is the single most common cause, and it's entirely fixable by you.
Suspensions happen more often than people realise, and Google isn't always loud about it. Common triggers include using a virtual office or mailbox address, keyword-stuffing your business name (calling yourself "Smith Plumbing — Emergency Plumber Loughton 24/7" rather than your actual trading name), or making several significant edits in quick succession. If you're suspended, you'll usually see it flagged when you sign into your profile manager.
Your primary category is one of the strongest signals Google uses to decide which searches you're eligible for. A heating engineer listed under "Contractor" rather than "Plumber" or "HVAC contractor" is competing in the wrong pool entirely. It's a two-minute fix that people leave wrong for years.
If your business name, address, and phone number appear differently across your website, your Facebook page, Checkatrade, and your Google profile, you're giving Google conflicting information about who and where you are. It doesn't have to be dramatic — a different phone number on your van's website to the one on your listing is enough to muddy things.
Duplicates are common for trades, because Google sometimes generates listings automatically from other sources, and because previous owners, staff, or a marketing company may have created one you don't know about. Two listings for the same business can split your reviews and confuse which one Google shows — or whether it shows either.
Most tradespeople should be set up as a service area business — you go to the customer, they don't come to you. If your address is public when it shouldn't be, or your service area is drawn far too wide (or far too narrow), you can end up appearing in the wrong places, or nowhere useful.
Here's the one you won't find on most checklists, and we only know it properly because we ran into it ourselves.
We set up a Google Business Profile for a plumbing and heating business. It was verified. It was live. Signed in as the owner, everything looked perfect — the profile showed a real star rating, real reviews, opening hours, the lot. Search the business name directly on Google and there it was.
And yet, in the underlying business data that Google exposes to other tools and services, it simply did not exist.
That last detail is the important one. A phone number lookup isn't a fuzzy search where ranking matters — the number either matches a record or it doesn't. It returned nothing, repeatedly, over days. The listing wasn't buried. As far as that part of Google's system was concerned, it wasn't there.
This is what we'd now call propagation lag: a brand-new or newly-claimed profile can take a genuinely long time to work its way through all of Google's systems. The version the owner sees and the version the wider ecosystem sees are not always the same thing, and they don't update in lockstep.
Why this matters practically: if your profile is new, everything might be set up correctly and you may simply be waiting. There's no button to speed it up, no fix to pay for, and no fault to find. The honest advice is to make sure everything is correct, keep adding photos and posts so the profile looks active, and give it time.
We'd rather tell you that than sell you a solution to a problem that isn't yours to solve.
Run through these in order. It takes about ten minutes.
Sign in to your Google Business Profile. If there's a suspension notice or a prompt to verify, you've found your answer — it's reason one or two, and nothing else matters until that's resolved.
Check your primary category and your business name. Is the category the one a customer would actually search for? Is your name your real trading name, without keywords bolted on? Fix both now if not.
Search your business name and phone number on Google separately. If a second version of your business appears, you've got a duplicate to deal with.
Check how old the profile is. If it was created or claimed in the last few weeks and everything above looks correct, propagation lag is the most likely explanation. Frustrating, but not broken.
If none of that applies, you're likely looking at consistency issues across the web, service area settings, or simply being outranked by businesses with stronger review profiles — which is a different problem, and the one we wrote about in more detail in our piece on why competitors get your calls.
If you're going to do this yourself, do it in this sequence. Each step only matters once the one above it is sorted.
Verification first. Nothing else moves until this is done. If verification failed previously, it's worth trying again — the process has changed over time and video verification is now common for trades.
Then your categories. Primary category first, then add relevant secondary categories for the services you actually offer. Don't add categories for work you don't do.
Then your service area. Set the towns you genuinely cover. Resist the temptation to list half the country — a service area far wider than you realistically serve doesn't help you.
Then consistency. Make your business name, phone number, and address identical everywhere they appear online. Same format, same spelling, every time.
Then activity and reviews. A profile with recent photos, current opening hours, and a steady flow of reviews looks alive to both Google and to customers. This is the part that keeps mattering long after the technical fixes are done.
Most of what's above, you can do yourself in an afternoon. Verification, categories, service areas, and fixing your details across a few websites don't require an agency, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something you don't need.
Where it gets harder is when you're suspended and don't know why, when there are duplicate listings you can't get removed, when your details are scattered inconsistently across dozens of directories built up over years, or when everything is technically correct and you're still not competing — because at that point it's a ranking problem, not a setup problem, and ranking is a longer game.
If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, that's a reasonable thing to ask about before spending money on it.